After taking an in depth look at Google Plus last month, we decided to take a fresh look at another social network that hit the headlines last year: Pinterest. What we did not know is that we were in for a surprise.

Pinterest was one of the star social networks of 2012. Countless articles and reviews and paeans were written about it and, notably, unlike Google Plus, it never received much criticism.

Perhaps this was due to its user-base seemingly expanding at a decent rate of knots? Who knows.

So, we were excited when recently we were asked by an airline client to help prepare a travel inspiration strategy for them, with Pinterest as its backbone.

When we started analyzing how airlines are using this social network, we quickly realized that things were not as rosy as it might have been expected.

A sad déjà vu

The most striking aspect of our journey through 74 airline Pinterest accounts was finding a number of abandoned pages and several others that were simply recycling content from other networks such as Facebook.

The similarities increased further when we detected very low level of interaction on pins, with just a handful of comments, likes or re-pins even on the most successful posts.

In terms of followers, we were only able to find two airlines with more than 10,000 followers – Qatar Airways and Southwest Airlines – five with more than 2,000 and just over 10 with more than 1,000.

That left over 55 airlines with followers in the hundreds, which partly explains the virtual absence of any interaction. Even more surprising was the realization that we could not find any airline that had between 3,000 and 10,000 followers, leaving an unusual gap in follower numbers….

First published on Tnooz on March 15, 2013. Read the rest of the article here.